meaning a Thing, and not a Babblement meaning No-thing.  In the Restaurateur’s of the Palais Royal, the waiter remarks, “Fine weather, Monsieur:”—­“Yes, my friend,” answers the ancient Man of Letters, “very fine; but Mirabeau is dead.”  Hoarse rhythmic threnodies comes also from the throats of balladsingers; are sold on gray-white paper at a sou each. (Fils Adoptif, viii. l. 19; Newspapers and Excerpts (in Hist.  Parl. ix. 366-402).) But of Portraits, engraved, painted, hewn, and written; of Eulogies, Reminiscences, Biographies, nay Vaudevilles, Dramas and Melodramas, in all Provinces of France, there will, through these coming months, be the due immeasurable crop; thick as the leaves of Spring.  Nor, that a tincture of burlesque might be in it, is Gobel’s Episcopal Mandement wanting; goose Gobel, who has just been made Constitutional Bishop of Paris.  A Mandement wherein ca ira alternates very strangely with Nomine Domini, and you are, with a grave countenance, invited to ’rejoice at possessing in the midst of you a body of Prelates created by Mirabeau, zealous followers of his doctrine, faithful imitators of his virtues.’ (Hist.  Parl. ix. 405.) So speaks, and cackles manifold, the Sorrow of France; wailing articulately, inarticulately, as it can, that a Sovereign Man is snatched away.  In the National Assembly, when difficult questions are astir, all eyes will ’turn mechanically to the place where Mirabeau sat,’—­and Mirabeau is absent now.

On the third evening of the lamentation, the fourth of April, there is solemn Public Funeral; such as deceased mortal seldom had.  Procession of a league in length; of mourners reckoned loosely at a hundred thousand!  All roofs are thronged with onlookers, all windows, lamp-irons, branches of trees.  ‘Sadness is painted on every countenance; many persons weep.’  There is double hedge of National Guards; there is National Assembly in a body; Jacobin Society, and Societies; King’s Ministers, Municipals, and all Notabilities, Patriot or Aristocrat.  Bouille is noticeable there, ‘with his hat on;’ say, hat drawn over his brow, hiding many thoughts!  Slow-wending, in religious silence, the Procession of a league in length, under the level sun-rays, for it is five o’clock, moves and marches:  with its sable plumes; itself in a religious silence; but, by fits, with the muffled roll of drums, by fits with some long-drawn wail of music, and strange new clangour of trombones, and metallic dirge-voice; amid the infinite hum of men.  In the Church of Saint-Eustache, there is funeral oration by Cerutti; and discharge of fire-arms, which ‘brings down pieces of the plaster.’  Thence, forward again to the Church of Sainte-Genevieve; which has been consecrated, by supreme decree, on the spur of this time, into a Pantheon for the Great Men of the Fatherland, Aux Grands Hommes la Patrie reconnaissante.  Hardly at midnight is the business done; and Mirabeau left in his dark dwelling:  first tenant of that Fatherland’s Pantheon.